When do we use download-deps.py

Hello everyone im confused on this command i’ve read that we use it when cloning from GitHub, and then heard others say that we also should run it if we get cocos2d-x from the .zip ? also what exactly does this command do, it says it updates 3rd party libs? but what 3rd party libs does cocos2d-x even use ?

Hi, dependencies are located in external folder.
download-deps.py script checks is this folder up-to-date by comparing external/version.json with version on site and downloads if new version is available.

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if you download the .zip from our website, it comes bundled with the latest external folder at the time of creating the .zip.

if you clone our github repo, then you must run git submodule update --init and ./download-deps.py to get a complete installation. If you don’t you can’t compile.

However, sometimes we update what this external folder should contain, so running ./download-deps.py is beneficial to fetch those updates. You will of course need to re-compile your game to take advantage of what’s new/added/changed.

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